New spectrum is being allocated for wireless communication systems such as wireless local area networks (WLANs). Such spectrum may be limited in size of a channel, bandwidth of a channel, fragmented, or uncombinable to provide very high throughput (VHT) services. Given the limitations of such spectrum, the WLAN systems may only be able to support smaller bandwidths and lower data rates compared to high throughput (HT)/VHT WLAN systems, for example, based on the 802.11n/802.11ac standards.
The IEEE 802.11ah Task Group (TG) has been established to develop solutions to support Wi-Fi systems in sub 1 GHz band. To accommodate the sometimes narrow bandwidths required by 802.11ah, the 802.11ac PHY may be down-clocked by a factor of 10. While support for 2, 4, 8, and 16 MHz can be achieved by the 1/10 down-clocking described above, support for the 1 MHz bandwidth requires a new PHY definition with a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) size of 32.
For certain devices and traffic, in 802.11ah, 802.11, 802, or any other future device, it is desirable to reduce overhead to improve throughout. One source of overhead is the medium access control (MAC) header.